.:go get your own damn life:.

Friday, 2.15.08, I learned that I apparently own a business in Las Vegas, NV. called “Quantum, LLC”. I also apparently live there…somewhere like 3157 N. Rainbow Road or something like that. Not a huge deal. You know…I mean…sometimes we forget some periods of time in our lives. Sometimes we forget major events like opening businesses. Or moving to a new and exciting place like Las Vegas.

Sometimes we even forget about opening those two American Express business-class cards and charging on the upwards of 20K between the two of them. And then we do things like write bad checks to pay them, which makes the fine folks at American Express not-so-happy. And then they send friendly people like Angela West from National Credit out to collect that money from you.

Gosh…why can’t people just understand that we forget these things…?

…….

OK. So now that’s out there, I’m going to turn my sarcasm meter into the full ‘off’ position. I am now going to switch on over to my trusty ‘WTF, mate’ meter and turn that up to approximately 11. Out of 10. I’ve found that by adding that extra numeric setting on there, I have plenty of room to manuever in the current state of the world today.

Sometimes you just need that little extra level of ‘WTF’ in your life, you know?

Yeah, all of what I said above about Vegas and about a couple of cards being maxed and in collections is all quite true. And…let’s be clear just in case for some reason someone in the judicial system is looking stuff up on me about this and they could potentially misconstrue what I’m saying as, “Yes, I did this.”

1. No, I did not do this…nor would I ever even think of doing something like this.
2. No, I have never lived in Vegas.
3. No, I do not have 2 Amex business cards that I charged a bunch of money to and failed to pay.
4. No, I do not own any kind of business called ‘Quantum, LLC’.

I just found out about this on Friday morning when Miss West informed me about it. She and I spent about 15 minutes on the phone trying to figure out what the heck is going on, and she said she’d get back to me on Monday (tomorrow, 2.18) to let me know what else she has found out. There were a couple of points during the conversation where she said something about maybe not being able to prove that it wasn’t me, in which case I might end up having to pay it or whatever. Of course, uhh, that was a little bit of a shock. But I’m going to chalk it up to being that since she’s low-lady-on-the-totem-pole, she has no ‘effing clue what she’s talking about.

So I spent the rest of my entire day on Friday…at WORK, mind you…attempting to call everywhere that I needed to call in order to put some order to the madness and ensure that the bleeding of my identity and personal life was staunched as quickly as possible. I called the FTC. I called American Express. I called the credit bureaus. I called the police. I called the Texas DPS. I ordered up my credit reports. I’m praying that all of this work I’ve now done will help put this thing behind me as quickly as humanly possible. Fortunately, none of this has hit my credit record yet, which is a very good thing. But it just sucks because if it does, I’m going to have a heck of a time getting it removed.

But beyond the logistics of all of this, man…I can’t emphasize how crazy it is to know that someone out there actually has my social security number and it can be used pretty easily to do things like this. Just to give you an example of exactly how easy, apparently this fine person decided to open up these two cards on October 12th, 2007. Observe that I just said two cards. American Express allowed this person, without any questions or any type of confirmation, to open up two business class cards…on the exact same day. You would think that when a person tries to open up two cards that some kind of trigger would go off in the system that would enable some extra level of clearance/security/etc. But that isn’t the case.

Yep…that’s my latest excitement. If any of you happen to run into someone claiming they’re me and they work for Quantum Group, LLC…do me a favor. Punch ‘em in the face and call 9-1-1. I’ll give you a nice shiny nickle if you do it…

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 11:55 pm and is filed under General, Life, The Great Identity Theft Crisis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.